Last week, my iSight on my MacBook Pro stopped working.

Turns out this is one of those things that happens with these laptops (and yet despite that flaw, I would still name my first baby after them–talk about customer loyalty!). Last night I decided to schedule an appointment at the Genius bar at my neighborhood Apple store to have it looked at.

I thought I would have avoided the crowds by scheduling my appointment at 7:30 in the evening. But when I got there, the store was still pretty active (not as active as on a weekend–YIKES). I walked up to the bar and was immediately approached by a concierge. He asked if I had an appointment and I said yes, 7:30. He looked it up on his handy little iPhone and told me to have a seat at the bar and someone would be right with me. I did and within a few minutes, a kid with spiky red hair and glasses asked what was wrong with my iSight.

I pulled out the laptop and handed it to him saying the iSight had been working on it when I bought it last month, but all of a sudden, it stopped working last week. He booted it, checked the System Profiler (iSight wasn’t listed) even tested the light sensor on the display, which responded normally (odd). He said he would take it to the back and look at it and that it’s possible one of the cables may have gotten loose.

While he was gone, I walked around the store. It’s amazing how some people actually treat the Genius Bar as if it were an actual bar like on Cheers. One customer was chatting it up with a couple of the other Geniuses, asking about so-and-so, who was apparently promoted to some kind of manager at the Stonebriar location. I could picture my dad doing something like that. He already has his own “Apple guy” at the Northpark store, who he calls by first name.

When my Genius finally came back, he said unfortunately it wasn’t the cable. He suggested considering it’s a stock model that I purchased from a retail store, he could easily just swap it out and give me a new computer. But when I thought about it I realized I hadn’t backed up in a couple days and just finished doing concepts for a website project and therefore couldn’t afford to just swap it out for a new laptop.

And here’s where this guy earns his Genius status.

“What if I just swap out the hard drives for you?” he said. “That way you’ll get a totally new body, you’ll just keep your old hard drive.”

I considered asking him for his name and contact info so I could give him my first born. Instead, I said that would be FANTASTIC. He said all he needed to do was check his stock and make sure they had one and if they did, he would to a quick swap. And quick it was. Once he confirmed they had one, he took my laptop back there and in a blink of an eye, he was back with my new laptop (old hard drive). He tested out the iSight to verify it worked and it did. Hooray for customer service